French Playwright Quotes

Honoré de Balzac

Molière

Guy de Maupassant

Jean Racine

Pierre Corneille

Alexandre Dumas, fils

Antonin Artaud

You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

These wretched kings,
Of whom all men speak ill, have oft some good in them.

François Andrieux

He is the happiest who renders the greatest number happy.

Joseph-François-Édouard de Corsembleu

Marquis: Put a duck on a lake in the midst of some swans, and you'll see he'll miss his pond and eventually return to it.
Montrichard: Longing to be back in the mud!

A single nation that has succeeded in lowering the intelligence, the morality, the quality of the human race almost throughout the globe is a phenomenon never before experienced since the beginning of time. I accuse the United States of being in a constant state of crime against humanity.

Henry de Montherlant

In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped. It is never the one who slaps who gets the laughs.

Georges Feydeau

Whoever has but a moment to live has nothing more to hide.

Philippe Quinault

One has to look out for engineers – they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.

Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.

Alexandre Dumas, fils

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Alfred de Vigny

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

Guy de Maupassant

Medicine is a rich soil but it doesn't yield its harvest unaided.

O Richard! O my king!
The universe forsakes thee!

Michel-Jean Sedaine

When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.

It is no longer a passion hidden in my heart:
It is Venus herself fastened to her prey.

An impulsive action has never been classed as a crime.

In French: Un premier mouvement ne fut jamais un crime

Pierre Corneille

A kiss! When all is said, what is a kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter i in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; balmy communion with a flavor of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's hearts, and of tasting, on the brink of the lips, each other's soul!

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men. ―

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Women, rouse yourselves! The tocsin of reason resounds through the whole universe: recognize your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudices, fanaticism, superstition and lies.

Olympe de Gouges

A man without wine
Would be dull as a fly
And shortly would die

Pierre Beaumarchais

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.